Posts Tagged ‘Behavior’

For years, we've been hearing from fictional alpha males like Ari Gold and Gordon Gekko that nice guys finish last. Now, according to a collection of studies soon to be released in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there appears to be some truth to the axiom. While nice guys don't necessarily finish last, they rarely finish first. Researchers Beth A. Livingstonof Cornell, Timothy A. Judgeof Notre Dame, and Charlice Hurstof the University of Western Ontario, show how “agreeableness” negatively affects monetary earnings. Moreover, their research shows that this “agreeable gap” is more pronounced in men than women, who still trail their male counterparts. Here's a full version of the study. And here's the abstract:

That's from William Shakespeare'sHenry IV, Part 2. The point is that it's not easy being No. 1; constantly having to watch your back, stressing over who might be angling to knock you off, and steal your crown.

Four hundred years later, scientists are finally getting around to proving that axiom. A new study of baboons shows that being the alpha male in a group dynamic may not be worth the stress the position imposes. Here's the abstract:

In social hierarchies, dominant individuals experience reproductive and health benefits, but the costs of social dominance remain a topic of debate. Prevailing hypotheses predict that higher-ranking males experience higher testosterone and glucocorticoid (stress hormone) levels than lower-ranking males when hierarchies are unstable but not otherwise. In this long-term study of rank-related stress in a natural population of savannah baboons (Papio cynocephalus), high-ranking males had higher testosterone and lower glucocorticoid levels than other males, regardless of hierarchy stability. The singular exception was for the highest-ranking (alpha) males, who exhibited both high testosterone and high glucocorticoid levels. In particular, alpha males exhibited much higher stress hormone levels than second-ranking (beta) males, suggesting that being at the very top may be more costly than previously thought.

Sports fans are nuts, right? Prone to erratic, irrational behavior when their team is playing. You'd think that during the Big Game, violent behavior would spike, and maybe lead to higher rates of emergency room visits and even deaths? Not true. A number of studies show that big sporting events do not increase the number of patients admitted to emergency rooms, and in some cases, hospital visits and even heart attack rates have been shown to decrease during a major sporting event. Unless, of course, your team is losing.

The latest study in this vein, published this week in the Journal of Open Medicine, comes from Canada, where researchers examined emergency room visits during the 2010 Olympic gold medal ice hockey game between the U.S. and Canada. The game ended in a 3-2 overtime win by Canada and was seen by roughly half the country, some 16.6 million people, making it the most popular TV broadcast in Canadian history. The study found that the rate of total emergency room visits during the game decreased by 17 percent, compared with corresponding hours for 6 control days.

This effect extended throughout Canada’s largest province, amounted to a decrease of about 136 fewer patients per hour, appeared accentuated for adult men living in rural locations, and was most evident for those with milder triage severity scores presenting with abdominal pain, musculoskeletal disorders, or traumatic injuries.

Blind Spots looks into the gap between our intended and actual behavior; why we often overestimate our ability to do what's right; and how we convince ourselves to do what we want rather than what we should. The authors tie their theory to a string of recent blowups, including: baseball's steroid scandal, Enron's collapse, Bernie Madoff's fraud, and corruption in the tobacco industry.

Brazerman and Tenbrunsel have agreed to answer your questions, so fire away in the comments section. As with all our Q&A's, we'll post their answers in short course.

The 25th and last flight of the shuttle Endeavour has come and gone. Which means there’s just one shuttle flight left: July 8's Atlantis launch will be the 135th and final mission for the program, 30 years after the first shuttle test flights occurred.

For anyone who was around on Tuesday, January 28, 1986, it's difficult to watch a shuttle launch without remembering the Challenger disaster, when the space shuttle disintegrated 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. While the most commonly referenced explanation for what went wrong focuses on the technological failures associated with the O-rings, an examination of the decision process that led to the launch through a modern day “behavioral ethics” lens illuminates a much more complicated, and troubling, picture. One that can help us avoid future ethical disasters.

New research finds that credit-card holders pay down their debts more slowly when their statements suggest a minimum monthly installment. The Economist reports on the study, by University of Warwick psychologist Dr. Neil Stewart: Mr. Stewart presented 413 people with mock credit-card bills of ?435.76 (about $650) that were identical — except that only half […]